Paperbacks: Cross River TrafficUS!My Father's DaughterRosario TijerasSongs on Bronze: Greek myths retoldYou Remind Me of Me

Cross River Traffic by Chris Roberts (GRANTA £7.99)

The sad thing about London's bridges across the Thames, as Chris Roberts points out, is that few people actually notice them. Most Londoners either travel under the river via the Underground or have no need to cross it at all; and those who do regularly use them are likely to be distracted by the magnificent views of London they offer. The purpose of this book, covering all the bridges between Hammersmith and Tower, is twofold: firstly to refocus attention on the bridges themselves, and secondly to show how they have helped to shape London. The title, incidentally, isn't just a nod to Jimi Hendrix, but to the 1926 Royal Commission on London's Bridges.

Roberts's tone is pleasantly relaxed. Adopting a chatty style, he's never slow to qualify an architectural detail with an anecdote, still managing to hold back enough information for sections on "Brief Bridge Facts", which detail the vital statistics, and some notes on the engineers and architects. Hammersmith bridge is fairly useless ("In the space of thirty years (it) was closed, repaired, opened, bombed, closed, re-repaired, bombed again and eventually re-opened"); Waterloo is "the crossing of romantics and suicides", and the Millennium bridge offers diversions such as the Budgie Man, a street entertainer whose show is "Part Blue Peter, largely avian and completely bonkers". There are very few books that inspire readers to go and physically exert themselves, but this one should have people criss-crossing the Thames until their shoes wear out.

US! by Chris Bachelder (BLOOMSBURY £10.99)

Upton Sinclair was a prolific American author whose work usually advanced a socialist point of view. His most powerful and best-known work, The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the American meat-packing industry, caused a public uproar, but not, as he hoped, about the workers' conditions; instead people were revolted at the way their food was being prepared. In US! Sinclair, who died in 1968, is repeatedly and literally brought back to life by hopeful socialists only to be killed off by rednecks, feckless students and capitalist chancers intent on keeping the country the way it is. It's a well-meaning novel, chronicling the demise of the American Left and the growing fanaticism of the Right, that mixes songs, interviews, lists and newspaper articles with the main text to create the kind of satirical jamboree that will doubtless delight anyone who enjoyed Bachelder's similarly constructed last effort, Bear V Shark.

Yet the project very quickly starts to feel laboured, as if the author's locked himself on a course he can't deviate from. The jokes surrounding Sinclair's prodigious output grow especially predictable. Guidelines for a course in Advanced Fiction Writing delivered by Sinclair ("Literature as a Class Weapon") stress that each student will research, write and self-publish four novels; a list of Amazon-type customer reviews for his books has more than three pages of "Be the first to review this book!" comments before the reader hits the inevitable terrible review written by a moron.

My Father's Daughter by Hannah Pool (PENGUIN £8.99)

Born in Eritrea in 1974, Hannah Pool was placed in an orphanage following the apparent death of her parents. A few months later she was adopted by a white British lecturer and his wife working in Khartoum; but after four years the woman killed herself and, after some disruption, Pool was taken to Manchester. Her father remarried, she gained a Manchester accent and spent the next 10 years living a normal, happy life. Pool ignored her father's attempts to teach her about Eritrea: "I'm not Eritrean, I'm just black," she used to say.

In 1993, however, Eritrea gained its independence, and the guerilla fighters her father had known while working there became government ministers. Along with many other supporters of the struggle, he was invited back and, on a whim, he went with an English priest to visit the orphanage Pool had come from. Not only was the place still standing, but the nun who'd arranged Pool's adoption, Sister Gabriella, was also still working there. Back in the UK, the priest who'd accompanied him to the orphanage got in touch to say that Sister Gabriella had confessed to him that Pool wasn't in fact an orphan - that her birth father and brother were still alive. A letter soon followed from her brother, but she chose not to answer it. That was to take another nine years. This is the story of Pool's return to Africa to meet the family she never knew she had. The way she manages to make sense of her complex identity is extraordinary.

Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco (SEVEN STORIES £8.99)

Rosario's second name is a nickname, meaning scissors: as a young girl she used a pair to castrate a man who raped her and to cut the face of one of her teachers. This tough Colombian novel, skilfully translated by Gregory Rabassa, is the grim story of Rosario's life as told by her close friend Antonio, while she bleeds to death from gunshot wounds.

Antonio tells us how he and his friend Emilio, Rosario's lover, met her at one of the clubs "that attracted the lower classes who were beginning to rise and those of us among the upper classes who were beginning to fall". They are rich boys intimidated by the men who keep guns stuffed down their trousers "increasing the bulge, showing us... that they were bigger men than we, bigger hell-raisers". Although Emilio becomes her boyfriend, dragged into her world of drug gangs and addiction to the point where they murder a man together, it's Antonio who grows closest to her, only sleeping with her once. But even to him the details of her life are never made completely clear. Every time she kills someone, she eats uncontrollably, becoming fat until the power of the murder seems to dissipate and she slims down again. Her age is uncertain and she has no idea who her father is - her mother lives with a succession of losers, one of whom raped Rosario for the first time when she was just eight.

If you like crime fiction, surely it makes sense to read books set in places where there's a little more anarchy than Edinburgh or Oxford? This book is exceptionally bleak, but at least the darkness isn't contrived.

Songs on Bronze: Greek myths retold by Nigel Spivey (FABER £8.99)

Anyone brought up to know the Greek myths through Roger Lancelyn Green's excellent Tales of the Greek Heroes, a U-certificate retelling of the tales, will be surprised to see what a peculiar mess Nigel Spivey has made of this attempted adult version. He may not be the first accomplished author to wilt under the strain of such a project, but he might be the only one to infuse them so airily with the spirit of Enid Blyton. Faber might have done better than to put a Cambridge Fellow on the job.

Perhaps one problem lies in pinning down exactly what the original narrative of these stories might be; another lies in the difficulty of identifying a suitable register for Gods to be Godlike in. Modern-day superheroes, the creatures who possibly shape our expectations of this kind of book, tend to lead very subdued lives compared with the antics of the Greek mythical characters. They have prissy origins in science labs and chemical accidents, rather than through more disturbing acts like sex with a bull (the Minotaur). In this version, though, however barbarically the Gods behave, they still sound as if they can't wait to head back to their dorm for a sticky bun.

Introducing the story of Demeter and Persephone, Spivey declares: "The Giants were minor cousins of the Titans; yet big sprawling brutes all the same. Insolent lumps, they launched a siege of Mount Olympus." Later, Hades stared at Persephone and "his knees began to melt. There was a tremor in his stance that was entirely new to him." Too much lemonade and delicious fruit cake?

You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon (JOHN MURRAY £7.99)

As a child, Jonah Doyle liked to play with his grandfather's Doberman, Elizabeth. Perhaps this is all the information a reader needs to understand why, in later life, Jonah spent a large amount of his time explaining to gawping strangers why his face was so horribly scarred. Troy Timmens didn't do stupid things to dangerous dogs when he was a boy. Instead, he hung around a pair of drug dealers: his cousin Bruce and his wife, Michelle. Teenage girls dropping by to score often remarked how, even at the age of 10, Troy had a certain charisma. His laugh was unusually low and powerful, making him sound more experienced than he was and there was "something in his manner and face... even the way he carried himself that seemed eerily unchildlike".

As the novel slowly and poignantly progresses - in places very slowly and with aching poignancy - it becomes clear that there is a bond between Jonah and Troy. That link is their mother Nora who, when she was young, was forced to abandon Troy for adoption at an awful home for unwed mothers. After Nora's death Jonah sells up the family home, loads a few things into his car (including his mother's ashes, which soon get dumped at the roadside) and sets out to find his older brother.

In places, Chaon's writing is quite simply wonderful, in others it shifts forward at the same pace and intensity for far too long, blurring moments that would otherwise feel special. Overall this is a really good novel, but Chaon needs to relax a little if he's ever going to do his undoubted talent justice.